I've been reading an article you wrote in September's issue of Standpoint magazine, where you make many claims for what you're doing to the education system in England. You start by drawing conclusions from your own personal experience by contrasting the secondary school experience of some students at a Merseyside school with your own. Fair enough – except that you forgot to tell us that your secondary education was at a private school. Whatever the virtues of Robert Gordon's college, the two ways to get into the school – by paying or by scholarship – were not available to all. But then isn't that why such schools exist? Precisely in order to bestow something exclusive on a tiny minority, with only a tiny minority of that minority being offered – as you were – admission by exam.

You imply throughout your article that it is the excellent education you received at Robert Gordon's that you want everyone to get. It's an honourable objective, and in order to explain why England's state schools aren't as good as yours was, you conjure up the image of teachers, unions, local authorities and a Labour government straining to deprive poor children of a good education. By contrast, you say, your government has been "setting out to prove that every child can succeed". The problem with this argument is that your government has put in place rock-hard structures and processes that will guarantee that every child can't succeed.

So, you claim that you've been "recruiting more highly qualified teachers", but neglect to remind us that you've "freed up" academies and free schools to recruit non-qualified teachers. You say that you've "restored rigour and honesty to our exams", but forget to tell us that your interference with exam-grading has, for political reasons, fixed the marks. It has become impossible for pupils at 16 to improve on the scores they got at 11. Rigour? You mean "rigged". You say you "reward schools that teach the traditional subjects", but neglect to mention that this means by default students are getting less technology, drama, art and music, as if these are less valid or less useful. You say you've "toughened up inspection", but I hear from schools that this translates as Ofsted inspectors becoming increasingly unwilling to listen to teachers.

You talk about wanting every school to be as good as the best, but schools are placed in league tables, which by definition rank all the schools bar the first as not "being as good as the best". You claim that the academy programme will bring about school improvement across the board, but you deprive your readers of any stats on how many academies are failing Ofsted, how many you ordered to change their management, how many have called for help from the "local bureaucratic monopolies" (your words).

You conjure up the picture of a "we" hoping to "compete internationally" and "providing jobs for all" being held back by low marks. Perhaps you didn't notice your party choosing to withdraw from international competition in labour-intensive industries, opting instead for financial services. Perhaps you didn't notice that it wasn't low exam marks that blew Britain's productive capacity out of the window, but the greed of those same financial services. Perhaps you didn't notice your own government re-jigging the labour market so that "jobs for all" means lower pay, zero-hours contracts, a pool of the unemployed and part-time work for millions. The international competition your government believes in has nothing to do with good exam grades. It's all about low pay.

In the article you talk of the virtues of a knowledge-rich curriculum as if this is good because it is "traditional". It is indeed "traditional" in that there was a long tradition of the knowledge-rich curriculum being used as a means of segregating pupils. It proved to be ideal for selecting pupils for different kinds of school, different kinds of course, different streams and different exams. You seem unable or unwilling to explain how a "knowledge-rich curriculum" is of itself liberating for all, whilst in my time at school it was so ideal for excluding the majority from its virtues.

You trumpet the glories of what you call our "world-class" A-levels. I've been in an international school this week and their view of the international competition you go on about is that only the International Baccalaureate will do. There's a clue in the name, I guess.

Of course you tell us that performance-related pay is going to improve teaching. No, it will be an obstacle for improvement because it will inhibit many teachers from sharing their skills, knowhow and knowledge. Surely, it's when we share expertise that we raise standards?

Your legacy is the near-complete destruction of local democratic running of schools. You adopt a rhetoric in this article and elsewhere that dresses this up in the language of liberty. You cite Tony Blair, who talked of schools being "freed" from "politically correct interference from state or municipality", but then you forget to tell us that this new freedom is controlled by a political interference from somewhere else: from one person – the education secretary.

And the sum total of all this is improvement?

(By the way, according to your criteria – not mine – your own international competitiveness will be held back by the fact that you spelled Massachusetts "Massachussetts".)